Choice For Its Own Sake Leads To Another Gosnell

Let not Kermit Gosnell be the sole face of the horror that is abortion. Gosnell is one man out of an unknown number in a horde who are, no more and no less, killers of babies born and unborn. A majority of these savages will never face punishment for the crimes against humanity they are guilty of, much less be charged. Gosnell is one exception against whom justice was served. Douglas Karpen will hopefully be the next.

No claim can be made that a right-wing conspiracy is in the works against Karpen. Just as happened in the case of Gosnell, Karpen has been accused by his own former employees—no right-wing pro-lifers are they. These four women allege that the practice of delivering live babies and then snipping the spinal cords in their neck was not a unique fetish of Gosnell, but a practice which Karpen did regularly as well.

But that is not the limit of his barbarism. “Sometimes he couldn’t get the fetus out… [and] he would yank pieces, piece by piece, when they were oversize,” said Deborah Edge, one of Karpen’s accusers.

This is called “choice.”

Karpen also—if you have weak stomachs, skip this paragraph—“twist[ed] their heads off their necks with his own bare hands.”

Choice.

Edge also said that she and Karpen’s other assistants “used to look at each other and sometimes our tears would come out with the other assistants. We would always think, ‘He’s so greedy.’“

Greed is the least of what is the matter with Karpen and his fellow pro-choicers. It is often said that, at the core of its ideology, the pro-choice movement seeps with a disrespect for life. We can see this exemplified when Karpen’s assistant refer to human babies with the dehumanizing pronoun “it.” “When he did an abortion,” said Edge, “…most of the time the fetus would come completely out before he either cut the spinal cord or he introduced one of the instruments into the soft spot of the fetus in order to kill it” (emphasis my own). If a fetus comes “completely out,” there is no justification for calling him an “it.” “It” is a newborn human baby.

Disrespect for life may have been fundamental to the pro-choice movement’s establishment, and while it certainly still is, it has devolved into an outright disdain for life. This is why we don’t see pro-choice activists encouraging women to choose to give birth, but instead to visit Planned Parenthood to have them inform the mothers-to-be of the rates for different abortion packages. (Exterminate one twin; snuff the second for half-price.)

The encouragement of choice independent of moral considerations over the encouragement of the ethical, righteous choice has contributed to this hatred of life. When choice for its own sake is portrayed as a virtue, it necessarily categorizes the opposite point of view—the anti-choice but pro-human point of view—as an evil.

Thus are born all the Gosnells and the Karpens and the other, everyday pro-choicers.